Subscribe Feed (RSS)Not very recently, in January, I bought a new phone- the Samsung Corby PRO aka GT-B5310, known as the Genio PRO in the UK. The Corby series is great value for money and I'll be posting a review of the phone and reasons for buying it soon.
The phone has a sliding QWERTY keypad and so most of the inbuilt apps and stuff rotates automatically when you slide-out the keypad. If you've been using the Corby PRO for a while, you would've noticed that the additional Java applications you've installed don't have auto-rotate support and its quite a PITA to type with the QWERTY keypad while the display is in portrait mode. Thankfully, there is a solution to this problem. All you need is an archive manager and a text editor. Here's what you need to do-
1. Download the jar file on your computer.
2. Use an archive manager to open it and edit the MANIFEST.MF file found in the META-INF folder.
3. Add these lines at the bottom of MANIFEST.MF to enable support for auto-rotate-
X-Pax-Keyboard: Qwerty
X-Pax-TextInput-Hidden: true
MIDlet-Touch-Support: TRUE
MIDlet-ScreenMode: ROTATE
4. Save the jar archive after making the above changes.
Now transfer the jar file to your phone. But there's a catch here too. The Corby PRO's OS doesn't allow you to install Java applications by just opening jar files from the file manager. The only way to install applications is by downloading them from your phone. But thinking about it carefully, you don't really need to upload the jar file anywhere. All you need to do is create a HTML page and transfer it along with the jar file to your phone. Opening the HTML page from your phone will open it using the phone's web browser and you won't need GPRS to install the application. Here's what you need to do to create the html file-
1. Open a text editor like notepad.
2. Write this in the file-
<html>
<body>
<a href="<insert filename here>">Install Application</a><br>
</body>
</html>
Replace
<html>
<body>
<a href="Palringo.jar">Install Application</a><br>
</body>
</html>
3. Save the file with a .html extension and give it any name like installer.html
Now when you open the HTML file from your phone, you'll see a Install Application link. Clicking on it will install the Jar file you just edited. I managed to get all the applications I use to auto-rotate like this apart from those ones which don't let you download the jar file from your computer. This should work for all applications. If you face any problems, feel free to leave a comment.
Tags: File manager, HTML, JAR, Java, QWERTY, Text editor, Web browser, Windows
. Although I do have my end-semester exams to worry about but I can spare a couple of hours in a weekend to watch Michael Schumacher race.
